“I should have been an actor”, said Jeremy to Julie at Bourtree Cottage - according to Julie.
The director then momentarily switches the lights to the off-stage area, where we find D.S. Stan Jones earwigging on the young couple. Jones hears a cough or chuckle and interrupts them. The play then switches to the funeral of Nevill and June Bamber, where our film star [sorry, movie star], Jeremy, faces the world’s media, a virtual Theatre of Dionysus, at what is supposed to be his lowest moment. Here the actor switches to performer and naturalism gives way to theatricalism, even honky-tonk.
His former head teacher noticed it. Mike Ainsley claims his wife noticed. The corpulent actor who portrayed Stan Jones in the 2020 drama claims he watched the televised funeral, while still a student at drama school, and that he thought Jeremy was faking grief and distress.
If Jeremy was an actor, he wasn’t much of one, as it seems he didn’t convince many people, discerning or otherwise. Actors are professional deceivers; they integrate themselves into the drama they portray. A good actor is supposed to induce you into a fictional world in which you forget he is acting. A performer, on the other hand, is only any good if he makes it obvious to his audience that he is acting up for their benefit. Performers therefore thrive on melodrama and propound it, it’s their meat and drink.
At the funeral, Jeremy was more of a performer than an actor, with shades of Tony Blair’s severe and solemn performance at the 1994 funeral of John Smith at an austere parish church in Scotland. Jeremy wasn’t engaged in deception necessarily, rather he was performing what he believed was a necessary code of behaviour at a social ritual, so as not to appear insensitive. The extended family who filed into the Church behind Jeremy were more straightened, po-faced and upright, with not a tear or note of upset in sight. They were the actors.
Colin Caffell was neither actor nor performer. At least at the funeral, he was just himself. In the archived coverage, he is cool and collected. He smiles reassuringly to Jeremy during the long painful walk across the cemetery, seemingly equanimous, neither perturbed nor over-joyed at the prospect of interring the ashes of the elderly woman he hated - though no doubt also conflicted about it, and of course pained inside at the loss of his sons. By Jeremy’s side is Julie, dressed properly in black, the girlfriend who identified the bodies at the morgue. In their strange and fraught relationship, the anger and the drama came from Julie, the angst and the melodrama from Jeremy. Julie was the actor, Jeremy was the performer, and we can see this in the video of them at the funeral: Julie behaving conservatively and conventionally, ever the skilled actress, Jeremy affecting an emotional breakdown, ever the performer.
Julie, an ambitious career woman of middling ability, perhaps really did want to be ‘Lady of the Manor’ and waited quietly for Jeremy to pop the question. He finally did over the Christmas of 1984, at which point Julie became his fiancée, even if Jeremy would subsequently deny it in the presence of Julie’s family and Brett Collins. Jeremy, in contrast, was unambitious and part of a farming family that was technically of the lower English gentry. He was not middle-class or suburban or boring. He was already set in life: he would be wealthy, this was guaranteed from the day he was adopted by the Bambers, but this came at a price, as all things do. The price in his case was the reduced parameters of a farming life in north Essex. Jeremy wanted experiences. Proposing to Julie was one experience, like proposing to Suzette Ford some three years before; he then moved on to new experiences, new buzzes. Now with his parents dead, he intended to move on more completely. The funeral was not just the ceremonial end of his parents and his former life, it was the end of his relationship with Julie. They were saying goodbye, even if perhaps Julie and Jeremy themselves had not realised it.
Julie had already done some acting in October 1984 with Susan Battersby when they committed cheque fraud together. Some three weeks after the funerals, she did a bit more and convinced the police that Jeremy was the culprit in the murders. She and Susan Battersby also returned to the bank they had defrauded to apologise and pay the money bank. The bank did not press charges.
Jeremy stole too, but his plans tended to involve performing for others, showing-off, boasting – for Liz Rimmington when, in August 1984, he told her that he planned to rob a large house in Goldhanger; for Julie herself, in February 1985, when he took her to Osea Road to rob the site office at the holiday park, then took her out in London to spend the money. Jeremy was insecure and out of place. He was an adopted son brought up among an extended family who resented him. He was too posh for the local schools and not posh enough for the boarding school, Gresham’s. He was neither one thing nor the other. He did not fit in. On the tractor, he liked to dress as a New Romantic. Julie was from a middle-class family; there had been a divorce when Julie was an infant, but largely Julie’s upbringing was normal and untroubled. She fitted in and was a conventional, average person who intended to pursue a career. As such, Julie was an unconscious emulator of those around her. She was not exceptional, she just did what was expected of her.
Julie’s tendency to emulate others and go with convention was and is typical of most people. One calls to mind Shakespeare in
As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII: “
All the world's a stage” · And all the men and women merely players…” Yet that quote from Shakespeare is usually misunderstood or taken out-of-context. Shakespeare is not suggesting that everybody puts on an act in life and is false, rather he is referring by analogy to the different stages of life and their vicissitudes, suggesting they are rather like different parts of a stage play. Both Julie and Jeremy had a long life ahead of them. Who knows how Jeremy’s ‘act’ might have changed and matured? We know Julie’s did. She got her ‘act’ together, so to speak, but she foreclosed that chance for Jeremy - or Jeremy destroyed himself, depending on how you look at it. But if Jeremy is guilty, then who was responsible for turning him to this wickedness? There is a prior question in the same vein, concerning Julie and Jeremy: Which one most influenced the other? Did Julie’s tendency to emulate mean that Jeremy’s negative character traits rubbed off on her, and being rather impressionable and immature, she carried out the cheque fraud and sold drugs for him, so as to impress him? Or was Julie the manipulator? Or was it a bit of both? We will probably never know the truth, but the notion of Jeremy as manipulator and Julie as a manipulated party would fit with what we can discern about the character of both. Julie’s rebelliousness was, mostly, comparatively minor and of the kind that most hypocritical middle-class people indulge in when they are young, forgetting it ever happened later in life when they reassure themselves of their virtue and decency. Yet the question can never be fully resolved because the mystery of Julie’s culpability in the murders is left hanging in the air, unanswered.
We can also observe that the manipulation of Julie did not require special Machiavellian or Svengali traits on Jeremy’s part, merely a modicum of will over a younger, impressionable woman. But if what Julie says is true and Jeremy is the evil and wicked monster who stepped effortlessly into a dark Stanislavsky role and wiped out his family, then Jeremy must have gone bad somewhere and must have learned somewhere the skills needed for the art of persuasion. The obvious answer is boarding school, rather than White House Farm. Nevill was not a man inclined to criminality, crookedness or trickery, quite the opposite, and it is difficult to imagine him as a smooth-talker or a liar - though he was a hit with the ladies when he arrived in Maldon from Cirencester in the late 1940s. Jeremy must have picked up some of that from him, and we must also not forget the possible negative influences of June, a very upstanding woman, but mentally-ill. However, the influence of Gresham’s, where Jeremy was known to be a miscreant and a tease, was probably more pivotal in subtly turning him towards moral reflexivity and a general attitude of contemptuousness and selfishness.
We should reflect at this point on the responsibility of Gresham’s for what ensued. Jeremy's actual career at Gresham’s overall seems non-serious: escaping to music concerts and general misbehaviour; one of the few notes of seriousness was when he went to the effort of making a table in the workshop at Gresham’s, as a wedding present for his sister, Sheila. The housemaster in Fairfield House - a house at Gresham’s - William Thomas, described Jeremy as a “
bizarre character” who was “
not particularly distinguished artistically, in acting or in sports”. Mr Thomas also had other less-than-flattering things to say about his former charge. It seems that not only did Jeremy fail Gresham’s, Gresham’s failed Jeremy. These comments from Mr Thomas and those from the headmaster fail to consider the fragility of a young man who has not yet reached legal adulthood. Rather than conduct themselves with a little class and discretion, his former teachers and masters have behaved ungraciously, with not a good word to say for him. This is especially egregious when one reflects on the allegation from Colin Caffell and Brett Collins that Jeremy may have been sexually-abused at Gresham’s. Crucially, Colin and Brett make the claim independently of each other. If true, it is perhaps not surprising. If Jeremy is guilty, then apart from the obviously correct observation of Dr. Venezis, that to do something like that Jeremy must be mad (“
He’d have to be a right nutter”), to wipe out his family, including two little boys, he cannot be a fully human human being, he is a broken shell.
After the shootings, Jeremy metamorphosed into Colin, whereas Colin quickly grew up. For Colin, the White House Farm tragedy was a maturing event. For Jeremy, it was infantalising, and he became an exaggerated version of the Previous Colin Caffell, a sort of slightly trivial, overblown, selfish person. Colin himself took a holiday and bought a car during this period, but in Colin’s case it was just a holiday and just a car. In Jeremy’s case, taking a holiday meant going to St. Tropez, and a car meant potentially buying a Porsche. Jeremy was like an oversized, larger-than-life character in a stage play, the type who comes on stage and people either cheer or boo at, or maybe a bit of both. His role in the amateur performance of
Horrortorio at the Goldhanger village hall in April 1984 presaged this. He was ‘The Thing’: an amorphous non-character, scaring people During early court appearances, he smiled to waiting friends as he was being taken in and out and smiled creepily for a cameraman as he waited in the back of a police car.
There is an element of envy, what might be called tall poppy syndrome, in English culture, and a hypocritical pressure towards overt propriety, regardless of how this contradicts private conduct. Some people were simply jealous of Jeremy, nevertheless, Jeremy had flaws and by 1985, had not fully grown-up. How could Gresham’s have helped him avoid his Fate? Jeremy may well have developed the same bad character flaws even without the abuse, so the question stands either way. Might drama and acting have worked therapeutically to improve and reform Jeremy and help him mature into a man in every proper sense? On the face of it, Jeremy’s involvement in acting and drama at Gresham’s was thin and consisted of appearing in maybe two or three plays. This is surprising, as he seems like the type who would excel at acting. Let’s imagine, then, an alternate reality in which we are conducting the drama class at Gresham’s, and Jeremy is our pupil. Identified as a badly behaved boy with developing character and attitude problems, the goal is to help reform him by reshaping his character through the medium of drama and performance, in the (perhaps forlorn) hope that this alters how he understands and relates to others. How could this be achieved through drama? One way would be to encourage a greater seriousness in Jeremy: to build his self-confidence, on the basis of seriousness and diligence and other characterful traits that are virtuous.
The first step is to get Jeremy into a role. Berthold Brecht famously remarked in a poem,
The Curtains, that acting is “work, not magic”. The actor has to learn a script, or he must be skilled at improvising. He must also be willing to take a risk and perform in public in an arena in which he could make a fool of himself. All of this encourages certain qualities and attributes: Stoicism, confidence, bearing, good memory. The actor is the focus of attention, something Jeremy would have liked, but he also has to give the floor to others and listen to what they say so that he knows when to make his own entrance or respond to cues. The actor must also take direction, usually from an older person, and faces immediate feedback on what he is doing, often of a negative nature in which he is criticised or upbraided.
It seems that, as noted earlier, the actor is fake from the beginning, but in a way he isn’t. Unlike a veritable extroverted performer, who looks outward to his audience and their need for attention and entertainment, to be any good, the actor must be an introvert and search inside himself, either for self-knowing or a sense of duty. He must have empathy for the character. A little sympathy helps too. Empathy requires imagination. We have also seen how the actor must become skilled at relating to others, and ‘professionally’, he must have honesty, reliability and integrity. It is not the same as failing to turn up for a French exam or a game shoot. If the actor doesn’t turn up, he lets down everyone and his actions have ramifications.
The role we should ask pupil Jeremy to perform for us needs to be serious. Not ‘The Thing’ or the minor part he had in a performance of
The School for Scandal at the real Gresham's. We should have Jeremy slip into one of the great roles of English literature, indeed English history - he should learn by rote and perform Henry V’s St. Crispin's Day speech in Act IV, Scene III of the eponymous play by Shakespeare. One way to begin would be to provide him with an example of a real actor, perhaps a famous one, performing the same role.
Most people think of Laurence Olivier, and that was a great performance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk_rPHoSc8wAnother example is that of David Gwillim as Prince Hal in the 1979 TV movie:
I also like Mark Rylance’s performance as Henry V, which marks a return to naturalism and ‘originalism’ in which the play itself is the focus rather than the actors or the proscenium:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOouofFFrZE That was performed pretty much how it would have been in Shakespeare’s time, when actors were low-class and anonymous.
Another Rylance performance from Henry V, in essentially the same acting style:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvGnXQkTWuw (For anyone interested, here is an interview/talk by Mark Rylance, mainly on the topic of Shakespeare:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrZH9WmpOrw).
Would a more confident, accomplished Jeremy, able to recite and perform Henry V from Shakespeare, have bunked-off to watch music concerts or taken cannabis? I personally doubt it because I think within him Jeremy had ‘something’, some sort of talent, and part of his problem was that he could not quite bring it out because Gresham’s was the wrong forum for it. He did not grow up. Instead, he left Gresham’s lost and without direction or ambition. That school had hollowed him out when they should have filled him up.
A filled-up Jeremy would have had his indiscretions, yes, as everyone does, but he would have recognised his duty to carry on the farming tradition and the opportunities this gave him to serve others and prosper. In that alternate reality, the funeral of his father, Nevill, would have been a different affair. Let’s pause to imagine it. Nevill has died peacefully and content, knowing that Jeremy will carry on the farm, along with Sheila’s children. Jeremy is a mature and responsible young man, engaged to be married, and will soon have a family of his own. Respectable and considerate of his mother, Jeremy has been seen occasionally at the local parish church over the years but is not devout, nevertheless he is asked to speak at the service. In his mind, the young farmer would call back to those purple days at Gresham’s and the dignity and bearing he brings to the funeral would reflect the lessons he learned at that prestigious school where he was trained as a gentleman, with only a few but important traces of a late 20th. century context. He would offer a measured speech to the congregation, and perhaps a prayer. There would be no ‘performing’. He would walk hand-in-hand to the gravesides with his plain, conservatively-dressed fiancée, Miss. Julie Mugford, and his mother, June, pay his respects, then quietly leave to have lunch at Vaulty Manor, with the rest of the family, who have all paid their condolences and offered support.
We can see how so much of this (admittedly, imagined) scenario is radically unlike the real Jeremy and his behaviour at the real funeral of both his parents, which was a grotesque operatic distortion of English propriety, albeit Jeremy genuinely may have meant it as a nod to propriety. Again, we return to Jeremy’s problem: in the real timeline, he was an essential misfit, thus even when – just maybe – he was trying to do the right thing, he was still off-key and produced an exaggerated facsimile. This can perhaps be explained by Jeremy’s inner insecurities: sensitive to how he would be perceived, and under the gaze of the world’s media, relatives and suspicious police officers, the performer had to over-perform when a Rylands-style underperformance would have struck a better note. At least, though, Jeremy did put on that facsimile. We are now in the age of the trashy funeral in which celebrities or just ordinary people laugh and share jokes and humorous put-downs about the deceased in a display of ‘contrived naturalism’, in which people affect to be enjoying themselves under the rationale of ‘celebrating a person’s life’. Rather like at a party that has gone flat and awkward, there are long pregnant pauses between scripted, semi-rehearsed set-pieces that are meant to be funny. In fairness, perhaps all this acts as a genuine emotional salve for those who are bereaved, and maybe also it lifts some of the typical awkwardness around people whose loved one has died - a distinct trait of the English especially.
This trend started, I think, in the 1990s. Sometimes it can be quite moving and dignified:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPgkl2dPqGw The blunt truth is that death is sad, and even in the very primitive, pre-emotional times of Man when ‘sadness’ and ‘conscience’, as such, were not conceived of, death would have signalled an underlying impending sense of doom for survivors, who may have wondered when their turn would come. Perhaps the trivialisation of the funeral rites, the laughing and joking, is a way for a secular society - in which religion and all its answers no longer has a strong hold - to deter such awkward questions. Not that such questions were ever aired in public anyway, but the effect may be to deter it from the privacy of one’s own mind, where the angst of frustrated existence always beats its tin drum, and in the case of men like Jeremy Bamber, bears an insufferable load.
